Weary of intrigues, I sat down and told him everything—starting with Eléna in the carriage so many years ago, to discovering she was the erotic poet and putting on her play as a tribute to her.
"How much is left of our money?" he asked.
"I spent all that I had. The Inquisition took the rest. How much do you—"
He shrugged. It was a foolish question. What I did not steal and lose, he no doubt lost to cards and women.
I expected, no, I deserved, to be beaten for my treachery. But he seemed to take it all with the air of a philosopher as opposed to the mal hombre loco that I knew him to be.
He lit a stinking, rolled tobacco leaf. "If you had stolen it from me to buy a horse, I would kill you. But to buy a jewel for a woman, which is what you did, that is different. I cannot kill a man for loving a woman so much he would steal or kill for her." He blew foul smoke in my face. "I do it frequently."
The next morning I found that the Inquisition had seized the print shop and arrested Juan the lépero. He was ignorant of my identity and would be unable to put the inquisitorial hounds on my trail and too ignorant himself to be burned for blasphemy.
Overnight Mateo and I found ourselves out of the comedia business, out of the book business, out of money, and no longer the printers for the Inquisition.
The gloom worsened as rains fell heavily and Lake Texcoco began to rise. Our concern turned to Don Julio at a time when he suddenly needed our help.
NINETY-THREE
Don Julio, busy with the tunnel project, knew little of our activity except that Mateo had obtained a role in a play. Isabella refused to see the play, saying that it would be belittling for her to attend a play in which one of her "servants" appeared.
The don's lack of interest in our activities was out of character. He was usually concerned with our staying out of trouble. His preoccupation with the tunnel worried us because it meant things were not going well. We heard stories on the street that the tunnel continued to suffer problems.
The don called the swordsman and me into his library at the city house.
"You are to be a lépero again," Don Julio told me, "and once again be my eyes and ears and those of the king's."
This time it was silver train robberies. The silver area was centered about a hundred leagues north in Zacatecas. I knew something about the mining business despite having never seen one. Mateo claimed that I was like Don Julio in that I lusted for knowledge more than women, and there was much truth in his accusation. The don's library contained several books on mining techniques and included short histories of mining in New Spain; I read all that there was to know about silver mining, even though I was after a silver thief not a prospector, and I cajoled the don into sitting down with me and telling me more.
In 1546, Juan de Tolosa found a fantastic mountain of silver, La Bufa, at Zacatecas in the Chichimeca indio region. The discovery, and the many dozens that followed, turned New Spain into the richest silver-bearing place on earth.
Tolosa, the commander of a detachment of soldiers, established camp at the foot of a mountain called La Bufa by the indios. Tolosa gave gifts to the indios, trinkets and blankets, and in turn they took him to a place where they said the rocks were "living." The glowing spirit in the rocks was silver, and Tolosa went on to become one of the richest men in New Spain.
Soon a new type of conquistador arose in New Spain, prospectors who ventured north into dangerous indio country, where the savage Chichimeca were unconquered. The men braved bloodthirsty indios, who ate their captives, and fellow prospectors, who would have put a knife in their back for a silver lode. Often they worked in pairs, and when a find was made they constructed a small tower over the claim where one man stood with a musket while the other rushed to register the claim.
Zacatecas was considered by some to be the second city of New Spain, outshined only by the greater glory of Ciudad Mexico. But Don Julio said the boom city was like a barrel of fish—when the last bit of silver is pulled from it, there would be no more city. But until then it was a place where one day a man might be in mud up to his knees cursing mules as he carried supplies to the mines and the next find that he is a fine "gentleman" of New Spain, referred to as "Don," and perhaps purchase a noble title in the process.
Don Julio said, "We first had a landed nobility in New Spain when each conquistador was given a domain from which to collect tribute, then a merchant class when cities began to rise atop Aztec ruins. Now we have a silver nobility, men who discovered that the dirt in their fingernails was silver ore. These men buy titles and wives from noble families and build palaces. One day they heard the bay of mules and had manure stuck to the bottom of their boots, and the next their dirty ears were titillated by murmurs of "Señor Marqués," as they went by with a new coat of arms on the side of their carriage."
The don told me the story of a muleteer he knew who became a count. "With his earnings from his mule trains, he bought a mine abandoned because it had become flooded and no one knew how to drain the water. He consulted me, but I was too busy designing a way to keep Mexico City from being deluged to help him. However, he and a friend devised a way of tunneling the water out. He became wealthy enough that when his daughter married, he paved the way from his house to the church in silver."
The silver nobles sent to Spain, the king's fifth, aboard the treasure fleet that bought the luxuries of Spain—the finest furniture, swords, jewelry. From the Far East the Manila galleons brought them silk and ivory and spices.
"In a country of chinos named China, a great wall, hundreds of miles long, is being built to hold back barbarians from the north. It is said that the chino emperor is financing the building of this wall with New Spain silver obtained from the sale of silk."
I knew something of the place called China, or Cathay, because the don's library contained a copy of the travels of Marco Polo. Christopher Columbus, of course, thought his voyage would take him to China and had a copy of Marco Polo's book on the voyage with him.
Silver was not just for buying noble titles, but the king's fifth financed the perpetual wars that the Mother Country fought in Europe. To get that money, the silver was mined and refined in the north country and hauled to the capital on the back of mules. There, some of the bars were minted into coins and others were shipped whole to Spain on the treasure fleet.
The transfer of the plate to Veracruz once a year was done with a troop of soldados, and no bandit dared attack. But the metal came to the mint from the mining country in so many mule trains during the course of a year that it was impossible to protect all of them. A system had been set up in which bags of dirt were transferred in mule trains as decoys. When the banditos attacked, they were met with strong resistance by soldados pretending to be indio mule herders.
"The robbers have begun avoiding the false mule trains and attacking those only carrying silver. The viceroy wants to know why. The schedule for the false trains is made in the mint and sent by messengers to the mines. My suspicion is that someone in the mint is selling the information to the banditos."
"How about the messenger? Or at the mines?"
"Unlikely as to either. There are different instructions to the various mines, all in sealed pouches. From the way the bandits avoid the traps, they know the entire schedule, not that of just one mine. The only source of the complete schedule in one place is the mint."